Anne was so flurried by the military incidents attending her return home that she was almost afraid to venture alone outside her mother’s .  Moreover, the numerous soldiers, regular and otherwise, that haunted Overcombe and its neighbourhood, were getting better acquainted with the villagers, and the result was that they were always at garden gates, walking in the , or sitting gossiping just within cottage doors, with the bowls of their tobacco-pipes thrust outside for politeness’ sake, that they might not the air of the household.  Being gentlemen of a and most affectionate nature, they naturally turned their heads and smiled if a pretty girl passed by, which was rather disconcerting to the latter if she were unused to society.  Every in the village soon had a lover, and when the were all those who scarcely deserved that title had their turn, many of the soldiers being not at all particular about half-an-inch of nose more or less, a deficiency of teeth, or a larger crop of than is customary in the Saxon race.  Thus, with one and another, courtship began to be practised in Overcombe on rather a large scale, and the dispossessed young men who had been born in the place were left to take their walks alone, where, instead of studying the works of nature, they gross on the brave men who had been so good as to visit their village.  
Anne watched these romantic from her window with much interest, and when she saw how other handsome girls of the neighbourhood walked by on the gorgeous arms of Knockheelmann, Cornet Flitzenhart, and Captain Klaspenkissen, of the thrilling York Hussars, who swore the most foreign oaths, and had a wonderful sort of estate or property called the Vaterland in their country across the sea, she was filled with a sense of her own loneliness.  It made her think of things which she tried to forget, and to look into a little drawer at something soft and brown that lay in a curl there, wrapped in paper.  At last she could bear it no longer, and went downstairs.
 
‘Where are you going?’ said Mrs. Garland.
 
‘To see the folks, because I am so gloomy!’
 
‘Certainly not at present, Anne.’
 
‘Why not, mother?’ said Anne, blushing with an indefinite sense of being very wicked.
 
‘Because you must not.  I have been going to tell you several times not to go into the street at this time of day.  Why not walk in the morning?  There’s young Mr. Derriman would be glad to—’
 
‘Don’t mention him, mother, don’t!’
 
‘Well then, dear, walk in the garden.’
 
So poor Anne, who really had not the slightest wish to throw her heart away upon a soldier, but merely wanted to displace old thoughts by new, turned into the inner garden from day to day, and passed a good many hours there, the pleasant birds singing to her, and the butterflies alighting on her hat, and the ants running up her stockings.
 
This garden was undivided from Loveday’s, the two having originally been the single garden of the whole house.  It was a old place, enclosed by a thorn hedge so shapely and from clipping that the mill-boy could walk along the top without sinking in—a which he often performed as a means of filling out his day’s work.  The soil within was of that intense fat blackness which is only seen after a century of constant .  The paths were grassed over, so that people came and went upon them without being heard.  The grass harboured slugs, and on this account the was going to replace it by as soon as he had time; but as he had said this for thirty years without doing it, the grass and the slugs seemed likely to remain.
 
The miller’s man attended to Mrs. Garland’s piece of the garden as well as to the larger portion, digging, planting, and weeding indifferently in both, the miller observing with reason that it was not worth while for a helpless widow lady to hire a man for her little plot when his man, working alongside, could tend it without much addition to his labour.  The two households were on this account even more closely united in the garden than within the mill.  Out there they were almost one family, and they talked from plot to plot with a and which Mrs. Garland could never have anticipated when she first removed after her husband’s death.
 
The lower half of the garden, farthest from the road, was the most and sheltered part of this snug and sheltered enclosure, and it was well watered as the land of Lot.  Three small , about a yard wide, ran with a sound from side to side between the plots, crossing the path under wood laid as bridges, and passing out of the garden through little tunnels in the hedge.  The brooks were so far overhung at their brinks by grass and garden produce that, had it not been for their perpetual , few would have noticed that they were there.  This was where Anne liked best to linger when her excursions became restricted to her own premises; and in a spot of the garden not far removed the trumpet-major loved to linger also.
 
Having by of his office no stable duty to perform, he came down from the camp to the mill almost every day; and Anne, finding that he walked and sat in his father’s portion of the garden whenever she did so in the other half, could not help smiling and speaking to him.  So his epaulettes and blue jacket, and Anne’s yellow gipsy hat, were often seen in different parts of the garden at the same time; but he never into her part of the enclosure, nor did she into Loveday’s.  She always to him when she saw him there, and he replied in deep, firm accents across the gooseberry bushes, or through the tall rows of flowering peas, as the case might be.  He thus gave her accounts at fifteen paces of his experiences in camp, in quarters, in Flanders, and elsewhere; of the difference between line and column, of forced marches, billeting, and such-like, together with his hopes of .  Anne listened at first indifferently; but knowing no one else so good-natured and experienced, she grew interested in him as in a brother.  By degrees his gold lace, , and spurs lost all their strangeness and were as familiar to her as her own clothes.
 
At last Mrs. Garland noticed this growing friendship, and began to despair of her motherly scheme of uniting Anne to the moneyed Festus.  Why she could not take prompt steps to check interference with her plans arose partly from her nature, which was the reverse of managing, and partly from a new emotional circumstance with which she found it difficult to reckon.  The near neighbourhood that had prod............